Garbled

The buzz about Google Wave has worn off considerably (I’ve been unable to hand out the 18 Wave invites I have; if you want one, send me an email), but I also feel like I’ve used it enough to talk about it intelligently. I hear a lot of people still speak about Wave with confusion. They ask things like, “What is it for?” and “What am I supposed to do?”. People talk about running out of things to do in Wave. I’ve never really understood the thinking that leads to these quandaries. I tried analyzing it to understand it, but I don’t get it. So I’m going to try to explain how I’ve been thinking of it and hope that someone else can maybe bridge the gap for me.

What Is It For?

In a word: collaboration. It is not quite email and not quite AIM and not quite a wiki. It’s all of them. If you’re willing to wave someone instead of emailing them, you’ll get only a little bit of win out of Wave, which is that you can add someone in later, go back to edit old content and reply in line. That’s nice and all, but I think not enough that people really notice. Especially if the other person they’re trying to communicate with isn’t checking waves frequently.

The real win, in my experience, has been when I’m working with someone on some kind of document. For instance, some buddies and I want to put together a Gowalla Trip around the UT Campus. We started with a snippet that just had a big bulleted list of ideas from me. Below that, we discussed other ideas to add or not and all three added them to the list. Then we’ve been going around making the Spots and when we do, we add the url to the listing. It’s been a wonderful work flow; some of it has been real-time like a chat room and some of it has been asynchronous like email.

Similarly, I was working on some code and couldn’t figure out what was going wrong with a specific bit of it. I IMed a co-worker about it and he was trying to help me, but it was cumbersome because he couldn’t see the code (it’s a big campus). We switched over to a wave, where I pasted the code in. He could see it, edit it, reply in the middle of it. So much more efficient than using AIM.

So that’s the trick. Wave doesn’t have a lot of win over email if you’re telling your mom when to come over for dinner next weekend. It has a lot of win when you’re working with someone on some kind of document.

I Ran Out Of Things To Do

Well, yeah. That’s a bit like saying you ran out of things to do with your table saw. The same charge could be levied at gmail: if you don’t have any more emails to write or read, there’s not a lot else to do. Especially before people get comfortable with what wave is good at, you’re not going to have a ton of new waves. I, however, have had plenty to do in wave recently. Partly because I’ve been trying to find almost any excuse to use it so I could see what it was good at. This meant people replied to me there and some stuff wasn’t so good, but mostly nothing was amazingly worse in wave than whatever other tool we’d've been using for that interaction else wise.

So Wave Is Perfect?

No. In fact, I’ve found something that it’s pretty bad at or at least very awkward at: random chatting. If I IM a friend across the country to see how he’s doing and our conversation wanders in topic, I feel like wave is sort of too much structure. On the one hand, it’s nice to be able to manage threading as topics shift and change (if I post a tangent, we can basically split the conversation thread there). On the other hand, it’s kind of a pain to have to manage threading as topics shift and change. When we switch topics, do I want a new wave? Not really. I’m just not sure what to do with that kind of thing. Maybe it’s a matter of discovering the right work-flow, but maybe not.

Relatedly, since Google has taken the liberty of linking my gmail/gchat/gcal/etc. account with my wave account, it would be nice to be able to take a gmail thread or a gchat exchange and import it into wave for further editing. This is especially when I’m in a random chat and the topic shifts to some project we’ve been collaborating on. I assume this is something that’s on the horizon, but as I’ve been using wave pretty regularly, I’d get a lot of mileage out of it now.

I also think there are some things wave is or will be good at that no one’s discovered yet. I think it has huge potential and I’d like to warn people off of giving up on it too early. Like so many things that are super valuable to know how to use and can change the way you work (or work/play) for the better, it’ll take some getting used to, some learning and some exploration.

So I use this great thing called OtherInbox. They’re in closed beta just now, but if you follow them on Twitter you’re likely to see when they hand out another round of invites (which they recently tweeted would be coming early in January, if I remember right). Let me tell you a bit about OI before I go into my rant. Hopefully it will segue nicely.

OtherInbox is an email, uh… application. Like Gmail or Hotmail, sort of. When you sign up for OI, though, you don’t get _username_@otherinbox.com, you get a whole subdomain and infinite email addresses at it. So, _whateveryouwant_@_username_.otherinbox.com. Then, when you login to your account, you’re presented with folders based on the email address that the email came to. It’s sort of like filters in other email clients, except you don’t have to set them up, you just hand out a new email address. So if I sign up for a new site, I hand it _sitename_@_username_.otherinbox.com and when they send me email, it automatically goes to a folder in my OI named after that site. So I have an Amazon folder and a Twitter folder, etc. etc.

You can also have a vanity URL and edit your MX records on the host so that email gets routed to OI’s servers, so that you don’t have to use the long _username_.otherinbox.com in your emails. So I have benhamill.com set up that way. Very, very nice feature, that.

Okay, so why might you want this service? Well, spam, firstly. If I’ve only ever given a certain email address away to amazon.com and I start getting spam to that address, I know who the culprit is. Also, if I want to sign up for something that I expect to get spam from, I can do so without fear. After getting that confirmation email, I can just hit the “Block All” button and OI will just not show me those messages. I don’t have to worry about it ever again.

Another use case which I’m loving is when you sign up for what’s called bacn; stuff you want, but not, you know, right now. I use OI to sign up for email lists and such that I don’t want cluttering up my inbox. Stuff I might want to read, but over the weekend or whatever; stuff that’s not time-sensitive.

Which leads me to my rant. If you’re not an OtherInbox user, the following might not make a lot of sense, so you might want to skip it until you are. And I highly recommend you become one. I found that the more I used it, the more I liked it. So, rant on…

OtherInbox is not your primary inbox. It’s right there in the name. I was confused about this at first, too, but it should be obvious. You don’t ditch gmail for OI. You use them both. How you divide it up is something people do differently, but here’s my rule of thumb: If it is sent by a computer (as opposed to a human), it goes to OI. What this does (ideally, since I haven’t finished converting all my accounts over to OI addresses) is makes it such that the only emails that show up in my gmail account are ones that are actually to me.

I mean–how many emails do you get from computers? If you’re like me then a lot. I get email every time someone follows me on Twitter and every time someone sends me a message in my online Diplomacy game and every month when Rock Band sends out their “zine”. Why not have a computer help me deal with it all? It’s not going to read it for me, of course, but it _will_ help me process them. If I know I ordered something from Amazon, then I will look at new emails to my amazon address when they show up. Otherwise, I’ll probably ignore it.

However, OI is pretty bad at displaying conversations. I mean–that’s not a fault, that’s not part of their core mission. They’ve been talking about adding a feature like that since it makes sense for mailing lists, but for personal email, gmail is still king. Tags and search and conversation view, etc. That’s what gmail is good at. OI is good at sorting spam and bacn.

People who talk about having their friends each email an OI address based on their name just confuse me. Your friends aren’t going to sell your email address to spammers or send you stuff you don’t want to read (or, if they are, get new friends… elderly relatives, on the other hand, who will send you random jokes might warrant an OI address), so there’s no need to hide you *real* email address. If you want, you can set up auto-forwarding for an OI address, but just hand that out to real people like you would your real address.

It can get sort of heady, making up any old address to give to people, but if you’re handing out OI addresses to real people, you’re sort of defeating the purpose of OtherInbox. Either you’re using OI’s interface, which is optimized for dealing with emails en mass, or you’re having to set up a bunch of auto-forwards to your primary inbox (with the nice interface for dealing with individual emails). OI is supposed to make it so you don’t have to set up filters or auto-forwards all the time.

I really love OtherInbox. If you’re not a user (and you didn’t skip the rant), really go follow them on Twitter and get an invite code. Or find someone who’s in the beta now and see if they have any invites left (I have a single one as of this writing). I didn’t think I was really an awesome candidate for an OI user, but that’s only because I didn’t realize how much email I get from computers. It’s really freeing to be able to click “Yes, send me updates” on everything. If you never get anything from them that’s worth your time, you never waste any time on it. Throwing away that email address it completely trivial. The real trick to having OtherInbox improve your life is not swimming against the stream, though. So remember my rant when you sign up.